FireEye Partners with Europol on Threat Intel

FireEye will be working with Europol's European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) on a threat intelligence effort.

The two have concluded a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), which will allow for the exchange of knowledge and expertise on cybercrime, mainly in the areas of early detection of cybercrime threats and statistics on trends.

"Law enforcement and private industry need to work together to effectively combat cybercrime, a growing problem on a global scale,” said Wil van Gemert, deputy director of operations at Europol, in a statement. “The MoU with FireEye further strengthens our strategic cooperation with industry partners to target the criminals behind these crimes."

Information-sharing and threat intelligence is shifting in importance as enterprises and other organizations look for increased visibility across the cloud, and control throughout hybrid IT environments. In order to provide predictive analytics, actionable, intelligence is a necessary piece of the puzzle. When it comes to law enforcement, being able to make connections between instances and bad actors, read patterns and find out if there are wider ramifications is nothing short of crucial.

According to Enterprise Strategy Group’s (ESG) Threat Intelligence Survey, IT personnel overwhelmingly (94%) believe that it’s highly or somewhat valuable to share threat intelligence. However, only 37% of respondents’ organizations actually do so—mostly because they face big challenges when it comes to putting threat intel strategies into place.

“There is clearly an understood value in leveraging threat data, but organizations are finding it difficult to collect, analyze and pinpoint critical threats,” said Jon Oltsik, ESG senior principal analyst. “According to our research, automation is needed for organizations to wade through the mass of alerts they receive, and standards are needed for the secure sharing of threat intelligence.”

That’s where FireEye can help—in both automated information analysis, as well as consulting. "The threat landscape is changing every day and with this, organizations need to try and stay one step ahead of the attackers,” said Richard Turner, president of EMEA at FireEye. “Working with Europol, this means that, as well as granting early access to FireEye's threat intelligence, FireEye will also be able to respond to requests for assistance around threats or technical indicators of compromise in order to assist Europol combating the ever increasing threat from cybercriminals.”